Parents Who Kill

The drama was familiar, and so, tragically, was its conclusion. Three days before Susan Smith reported her children abducted, 24-year-old Pauline Zile told police that while she and her daughter Christina Holt were at the Swap Shop flea market just west of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the seven-year-old had disappeared from a stall in the ladies' room. For five days, Zile played the terrified mother on television, weeping and running her fingers through the hair of one of her daughter's dolls. A massive hunt for the little girl commenced.

Then on Oct. 27, the truth emerged. Police had searched Zile's apartment and discovered blood. She had implicated her husband John, who led them to a 5- ft.-deep grave behind a local K Mart. Christina had never been to the Swap Shop. One night six weeks before her "disappearance," police affidavits report, John had beaten her on the body and face as her mother watched. John later added that Pauline joined in the beating. When Christina started screaming, he stopped her mouth with a towel. When she choked and went into seizures, he says, he tried to perform CPR, unsuccessfully. The couple kept her corpse in a closet for four days. Last Friday, just 17 hours after South Carolina police shocked the nation with the announcement that they were taking Susan Smith in for murdering her children, Pauline Zile, like her husband, was also charged with murder.

If only to maintain our faith in ourselves and our families, we are honor bound to believe each tearful young mother, to pray for the dog-and-helicopter searches and to wear psychological, if not literal, yellow ribbons. But even as we do so, again and again, we are coming to realize that the climax of such searches is seldom a tearful reunion or even an apprehended bad guy. Far more often, it is a recanting, a tormented regression from "she was stolen" to "she fell" to "I may have dropped her" to "I hit her with a big rock."

Not all abduction stories are fiction, of course. Seared in the memory of America is the kidnapping nightmare that ended in the death of Polly Klaas in Northern California last December. But we also remember the story of Paula Sims, who went public in 1986 about the "disappearance" of her daughter Loralei and, three years later, her daughter Heather, and is now serving a life sentence in connection with their murders. And then there was the case of Diane Downs, the Springfield, Oregon, mother who claimed in May 1983 that a stranger waved down her car on a deserted road and shot her and her three children, killing seven-year-old daughter Cheryl Lynn. She too is now in jail for life, convicted of murder.